Dmitri Gheorgheni
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dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
Dmitri Gheorgheni
@dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
280 followers 260 following 1.2K posts
Editor of the h2g2 Post at h2g2.com. My fiction has been labeled 'poignant and humorous'. https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Dmitri+Gheorgheni&page=1&pageSize=10&adult_audience_rating=
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dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #montonous
the tick, tick, tick of the metronome marking the moments in the empty room: why doesn't it run down? some ghost must wind it up again. dust motes swirl in lazy dance: monotony, though monotonic, is not, in and of itself, monotonous. space: waiting for a story to fill it up again. Image: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Moonlight, Strandgade 20. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
December 14, 2025 at 1:51 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
Snow and other seasonal sights. Stories, commentary. The Canary Islands. The Netherlands. A woodpecker. And lots and lots of ducks. Come take a look.
h2g2.com/entry/A88078...
This week's title is December Tales. Clockwise from upper left: A mallard duck swimming, a wadingbird on a moonlight night on a beach in the Canary Islands, a Dutch woman in folk costume laying a wreath at a graveside ceremony for fallen RAF crewmembers from the Second World War, a Christmas illumination with a snowman in earmuffs and scarf standing on an igloo, a stained-glass window with a Christmas decoration on the sill, A snow-covered tree with houses in the background, a rainbow bokeh of holiday lights, a sketch of a Christmas tree with tiny dancing figures beneath, a large statue of a woman, called Mamandyou, in the Canaries, an orange cat asleep wiht his head in his paws, and a strangely-streaked sky about chimneypots in Scotland.
December 14, 2025 at 1:16 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #apogee
Flirtations Selene pulls away: they both feel the tension. she is slightly elated, a dancer's high. she looks back, dizzy, sighs in coquettish ecstasy. draws closer, and the tides move up and down. apogee and perigee, distance and proximity between heavenly bodies can make waves for sure. in the meantime Gaia is busy working toward her own aphelion Image: Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan dancing. Project Gutenberg.
December 13, 2025 at 3:47 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #successor
On Hearing the New Poet Laureate Read His Verses Aloud successor to bardic laurels will he sing the terribly beautiful songs young mothers know or tell us how the moonlight's dream is past pleasure or past pain or even a road not taken? it is obvious he has a thesaurus and is not afraid to use it he also knows lots of bird names and flower names and when to throw us off by tossing in a startling word like leaf blower he probably paid attention in school every syllable of his work proclaims 'I have deep thoughts' must do: he's won all the prizes but I miss the music from before: such islanding from grief and Gwendolyn's small communion with the master shore thank god for the internet Image: Man reading by firelight, Library of Congress
December 12, 2025 at 4:11 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #illicit
All the earnest discussions here in the 21st century make me want to cry. 'Were the Flintstones Christians?' 'Is a romcom about love in the Hereafter Properly realistic?' What have we done to the world, friends? Nobody gets a joke. because we're too busy listening for an illicit opinion. Imaginations do not soar. Our mental images are all tainted. We can only tell it's AI if there are too many fingers, but not when the smiles are frozen. Our smiles are frozen, too. Possibly in terror. All I can say is: have confidence in yourselves. You, too, have worlds inside you. Worlds no algorithm could possibly dream of. Someday the flim-flammers will burn out. Your light will shine again. Image: Omar Khayyam writing, Project Gutenberg
December 11, 2025 at 5:42 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #bewitched
Fans of hip-hop and techno may not know it, but there's a thing called the The Great American Songbook. It's an unofficial canon of songs from the mid-twentieth century that form the standard repertoire of jazz musicians. They're a key part of our musical heritage. The songs don't only influence the thinking of musicians. They sneak into our cultural heritage in other ways. Take the song 'Bewitched'. It's from a Broadway musical you may never have heard of called 'Pal Joey'. It has very dodgy lyrics for 1940: 'Horizontally speaking He's at his very best. . . Vexed again, perplexed again Thank God I can be oversexed again. . . ' O-k-a-y. . .but you've heard this song somewhere before. Maybe in a cocktail lounge. Maybe a saxophone solo. Maybe as a weird pun in a cartoon. Image: Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred from Walt Kelly's Pogo. Paper piano by Hallmark.
December 10, 2025 at 4:44 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #consolation
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONWd...
Consolation Number Three brings a rush of feelings Franz Liszt never intended the bubble of internal laughter the way the old gent's right hand so casually bobs over the moving left to give that low note a patronizing pat on the head as if to say Don't interrupt, you, and then moves on in a smooth flow the flood of mingled joy and sadness at the memory of Miss C whom I loved who first told me to watch Horowitz on the tiny portable tv in her parlor born in 1888, she missed nothing of significance in the world from the first airplane to the moon landing to the complex physiology of piano playing who taught me to talk like a German and play like a Romantic now my consolation for the loss of her and all the others is to watch Horowitz patronize piano keys Image: hands on keys, DG
December 9, 2025 at 4:14 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #soliloquy
the famous actor stands in front of the green screen and recites the even-more-famous soliloquy while the camera moves in and in (so the backdrop added in Post will have its effect the music too will be added later manipulative loud) a soliloquy is a convention of the theatre the director told me we pretend the actor is talking to himself over there in the corner of the stage and that nobody hears him even though there's a whole audience out there mentally prompting 'to be. . . ' can't you see I'm soliloquizing? says Ko-Ko you have interrupted an apostrophe, sir! we soliloquize all the time we commune in our own heads we think no one is listening we are wrong there's an angel audience prompting 'to be. . . ' Image: Robert B Mantell as Hamlet, 1890. Library of Congress
December 8, 2025 at 3:43 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #magenta
What's that? Oh, the Battle of Magenta, 1859. What do you think of it? Not enough red. Aniline dyes made money. Yes, chemistry was the AI of the late 19th century. What? The crypto. The thing that was going to make them all rich. It certainly made them more colourful. Why did they name the new colours after battles? Enthusiasm. Ironic, really. How so? All that chemistry made World War I really nasty. I see what you mean. Image: The Battle of Magenta, Wikipedia.
December 7, 2025 at 1:57 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
Snow, snow, beautiful, annoying snow. Scary stories. Funny stories. International policy analysis. (What?) More Egyptian jokes. Cats, cats, and more cats. Also a possum. You have to see this.
h2g2.com/entry/A88078...
This week's title is Winter Winds Blow. Clockwise from upper left: A black-and-white kitten in front of a fire, a snowy field, a grey-striped cat looking up from the sofa. a black cat with narrow yellow eyes giving the photographer the stinkeye for disturbing it, a black-and-white cat, ditto, a rock that looks quite alien on the Cleethorpes beach, a possum at the bottom of the (now empty) food storage bin, a red and a yellow apple hanging on a snow-covered tree, a snowscape in Austrian with mountain, and one more cat: this one's calico and standing alertly in the kitchen waiting for food to materialise.
December 6, 2025 at 11:44 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #augury
Starlings must have been the favorite birds of ancient augurs there's nothing like a good murmuration to conjure up some future forebodings okay, bird godlets: do your stuff Image: A mumuration of starlings that landed in the tree in my backyard one winter. And just sat there, making noise and looking at me.
December 6, 2025 at 3:52 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #chic
Coco Chanel was so chic she defined cutting-edge in style, in clothing, in comme-il-faut pity she was a nazi Eleanor of Aquitaine also stylish defined courtly love shame about the crusades Livia oh Livia grand dame of ancient Rome everybody copied her hairdos poisoned all her relatives do we sense a theme here? fashion is not a victimless crime Image: Ancient Egyptian woman dressed to the nines holding some kind of ceremonial axe, Project Gutenberg
December 5, 2025 at 4:48 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #vespertine
Beuel, 1975 L'heure bleue: the sky makes your heart ache and your breath catch. Walk across the vulgar bridge that spans the river, the one where the little stone figure moons the opposite bank. Take a seat on the bench beside the slow-flowing Rhine. Surreptitiously slip off your shoes, feel the evening dew between your toes. The people over there in the romanesque church called it humor vespertine. Decide to go and ask them about it. On your way notice the twittering of the bats as they slalom down the row of poplars. Reflect on how much better a memory is than a photograph. Image: Guido F. R. Radig
December 4, 2025 at 3:58 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #chivalrous
My First Chivalry Picture Book Behold GODFREY DE BOUILLON, the perfect gentle knight of the First Crusade. 'Gentle' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here: it means he graduated from knight finishing school. Mostly he turned the Holy Land into a hellhole for fun and profit, while leaving the women at home to do the boring things like farming, food preservation, and the production of clothing and medicines. Here he is with his bros, knocking down some castle gate or other. Super chivalrous, was Godfrey. See DON QUIXOTE in action. Half a millennium has passed, but men are still dreaming of the glory days: when all a dude had to do to be cool was ride around on a horse wearing a tin suit and fight other dudes for pinks. Don Quixote got this way by too much media consumption: all those chivalric novels and courtly love songs went right to the old geezer's head. The next thing anybody knew, he was terrorizing this poor barber and calling his shaving bowl the 'Golden Helmet of Mambrino,' a clear precursor to an outline quest, if you ask me. This is KING ARTHUR, who was very chivalrous, even though his wife was messing around with his best friend. Actually, it's William Warder. Mr Warder was a porter at the docks on the Isle of Wight in 1874. It was a community project, you see: photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was helping her next-door neighbor, Lord Tennyson, with his book about knights and ladies. So Idylls of the King was acted out in their backyards. Which version of knighthood do you find most chivalrous? My vote goes to the cosplayers: dressing up beats starting wars.
December 3, 2025 at 4:33 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #aphotic
(This was because a cat jumped on my chest, no doubt.) I fell down into the dark waters, deeper than I'd ever been before. The water was cold. (The kitty had stolen my blanket.) It seemed a long time I floated down. The light grew less and less. I reached the aphotic zone. No light at all. (Do you realise how boring a dream is with no visuals? Darn that cat.) Suddenly I saw. . . this. A gelatinous sea creature bobbing along without a care in the underwater world. Its tentacles steered it. It glowed. 'How do you glow?' I thought. 'Ever heard of bioluminescence, dork?' 'Oh, yeah. That.' I cleared my throat. 'I guess there's a moral in this, surely? The lower you go, the stranger the creatures you meet? When the world goes dark, you have to make your own light?' 'I wouldn't know,' it replied. 'It's your dream, after all. I'm just looking for dinner.' It floated calmly away in the sea indistinguishable from a night sky. I woke up to hear the cat purring. Image: NOAA
December 2, 2025 at 4:02 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #suave Oh, yes, I'll show you suave...
Every year's the same. The grand lady of the castle proudly (but she pretends shyly, it's tradition) presents 'her' Christmas decorations. (Really they were designed by a crack team of this year's most fashionable decorators. Oh, but she 'personally selected' each and every ornament. Meaning they forced her to look at baubles for half an eternity.) Now the tree is lit and everything's magical, they say. The lord and lady stroll through the weird wonderland, dressed to the nines. Everyone says they and their tree are 'suave'. She walks suavely. The scented trees are suaveolent (that's a thing). At the microphone, her husband displays suaviloquy in his holiday address. She smiles a smoothly agreeable smile. Inside her head she is screaming, 'Who gives a suavity about Christmas?' Image: Project Gutenberg (a Christmas tree behung with large items of furniture).
December 1, 2025 at 4:04 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
Also: We have the best smileys at h2g2.com - check these out. Only a sample.
Partial smiley list includes apple, badger, candle, cogs, dolphin, facepalm, frog, hero, island, a spork facing left (to match the one that faces right), mammoth, a flan being flung to the left (to match the flan being flung to the right), a smiley running left (you know the drill), a biro facing left (ditto), a tomato facing left, a pot of petunias for obvious reasons, a prof, an Elvis exiting left (ask me what Elvising is), a snowdrop flower, a smiley holding beer in the left hand, footprints going left, a suitcase, and a rocket flying right, for a change.
November 30, 2025 at 10:16 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #last
someone just yelled into the void we need to reinvent society good idea somewhere deep inside all this misery a patient spirit is busy working fixing things isn't a half-hour job it's not like we clogged the sink or anything the spirit moves and having moved moves on until it finds the last unbelievably stupid idea we've stuffed into the plumbing of reality once it's done that off we'll go on a new adventure Image: Strange Sunset by SashaQ
November 30, 2025 at 1:32 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
More birds. Dogs in snow. Egyptian wall art. Modern art. Bluebottle jokes and other weirdnesses. Join us.
h2g2.com/entry/A88078...
This week's title is Change in the Air. Clockwise from upper left: a snowy scene in black-and-white, a tiny bird in late sun, a corridor between a wall and ancient columns in ancient Egypt, seated figures on an ancient Egyptian wall, a black dog posing against fresh snow, a peaked mountain in northern Ireland, a grey-striped cat peeking smugly from the bathroom sink it is completely filling, a bright jet control against a late-afternoon sky, and a flock of birds outlined against a low sky.
November 30, 2025 at 12:52 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #matters
(With apologies to William Schwenck Gilbert - who would, I think, be understanding.) If our eyes were fully open to our awful situation We would round up all the miscreants and make them an oration We would tell them we are bound by duty and our moral senses To protect the would from them and all impending consequences Of allowing them to run things with a leer and with a swagger To break planetary laws, engage in stupid cloak-and-dagger We aren't pirates, after all, or sycophants who gangsters flatter, So we've got to take a stand on all the things in life that matter! Climate change - yes, it does matter, matter, matter, matter, Human rights - yes, they do matter, matter, matter, matter The elderly and poor - yes, they do matter, matter matter! So it really all does matter For the future, it will matter You can bet your life that it will matter, matter, matter, matter! Image: Project Gutenberg
November 29, 2025 at 3:58 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #health
They say - you know how they talk - that Milo of Croton was an ancient model for health and fitness. He had an interesting regimen. One day, he picked up a calf and walked around with it. He picked up the same calf every day. By the time it was a grown, he was setting weightlifting records by toting beef around. Milo won all the wrestling contests. If he were around today he'd be a WWE superstar. The story goes that when he got older, he refused to slow down. One day he tried to split an oak tree with his fist. If you like tv wrestling, you probably don't know what an oak tree looks like. They're pretty hefty. Milo got his fist caught in the tree and couldn't get it out. The local wolves must have been hungry. Or else they had it in for Greek wrestlers. Anyway, they ate him. Lucian of Samosata wasn't a health-and-beauty icon. He was a writer. In one of his books he pretends to interview Charon, the boatman of the Styx, who is not impressed with Milo at all. Sic transit, and all that. There's probably a moral in all this, but it's a holiday weekend and I'm too full of turkey to bother finding it. Image: Project Gutenberg
November 28, 2025 at 4:17 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #learning
the main challenge for most human societies is learning the difference between information and knowledge the desert sands of history are littered with the skeletons of civilizations that failed to understand in time this is a test imposed by nature for its own preservation Image: Project Gutenberg
November 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #reflection
My thoughts are not the world my thoughts mirror the world I call my thoughts about the world reflection as the water gives back an image of the world around it when the light and the vantage point are just right my mind creates its own world an approximate copy of what it sees I cannot quite know how accurate it is but I hope that when viewed from the Creator's perspective it shows Him something He hadn't noticed before well anyway that's why I write Image: Summer landscape reflected in a still pond. DG.
November 26, 2025 at 4:18 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #timed
the first coming was timed to coincide with a state of human affairs that could spread a message in spite of the human tendency to kill the messenger plagiarize the insight bowdlerize the contents & generally try to interfere the second coming will be the kind of complete surprise where people say afterward you know I should have seen that one coming Image: Earth from orbit, NASA
November 25, 2025 at 3:32 PM
dmitrigheorgheni.bsky.social
#vss365 #relevant
High school in the Sixties was fun. Sure, the school's more traditionally-minded middle-aged lady teachers went around telling us that these were 'the best years of our lives' and trying to enthuse us over 'the prom' and such. We ignored them. Politely. We also turned deaf ears to the middle-aged male coaches who tried to convince us that 'life was like a football game'. We irritated the heck out of them by cheering ironically at pep rallies. 'Gimme an H! Gimme a U! Gimme an S! Gimme a K! Gimme an I! Gimme an E! Gimme another S! What does it spell?' 'Chihuahua!' The young teachers fresh out of school were mad to be 'relevant'. Our curriculum was made 'relevant' by the guest assembly of college players who performed Beckett's play 'Play', standing in trash cans on our stage. The performance was met with stunned incomprehension in the seats and raised questions at the school board meeting. The old teachers, though: the old teachers were gold. Mrs McFarland, who loved Dickens and whose husband once found an 18th-century shilling coin in the old corduroy road when the township repaved. Mr Kappan, who spent his Saturdays researching Roman history by watching Cinecitta movies with the kids at the Etna Bijou. Mrs Girty, whose husband descended from a notorious figure. She defended his memory: nobody learned math. Forget relevance. Give me memory. Image: Warren K Leffler, 1964. Library of Congress
November 24, 2025 at 4:23 PM